My 5 favourite nursing experiences

Claire is a second year student nurse at Birmingham City University. In this blog she discusses her five favourite nursing experiences, which she believes makes her profession as a nurse the best.

Hi everyone! My name is Claire Carmichael and I've just finished my second year as an adult nursing student at Birmingham City University.

I'm about to tell you my best experience so far in nursing and I'm here to tell you why, if you aren't already, you should become a nurse and fall in love like I did.

The people I’ve met

I have met the most amazing people on my nursing journey so far and those people are going to stay with me for life, I just know it.

You're gonna meet people from all different cultures, religions, all different walks of life, sexualities and you're just gonna hit it off and they're gonna just be your best friend you're going to start doing things together, you're gonna start experiencing things together, you're going to start this nursing journey together and experience so much.

It's just amazing; I've made a new nursing family and it's just incredible.

Every day is different

In nursing jobs, no day is ever the same.

One day you'll be doing one thing, the next day you'll be doing another thing. There's such a massive variety in nursing and people don't realise that actually you can do so much.

There's a whole world of nursing out there ready to explore and if you don't like one sort of particular area it doesn't matter because there's so much that you can do.

You can go into research, you can work on the hospital wards, you can work out in the community in general practice, as district nurses, in sexual health and family planning, you can go to theatres, the acute wards like A&E and ITU, you can go and work in hospices and care homes for the elderly.

The world is really your oyster in nursing and it's just amazing.

I find it’s just the best job in the world because it's so varied.

You meet so many amazing people, we have completely different patients one day to the next.

'Patients don't realise they make my day every day with a smile or a thank you.'

Team work

I have never worked with such an amazing team as I have with nurses and nurses really stick together.

They really pull together in a time of need, one person's strength is one person's and weaknesses and they all mesh together which benefits the patient so much. You work with so many different people, not just the nurses but you're going to be working alongside doctors, consultants, occupational therapists, physiotherapists pharmacists, pain management team... there's just so many amazing people.

You're going to work with the most amazing people there and they all specialise in their own thing and they're all interested in their own things so something that you might not necessarily know or that you're struggling with someone else is going to pipe in and help you out.

Nursing is real teamwork and it's just like having a family.

The most rewarding profession

So a personal favourite experience of mine in this career is when you've been working hard to help get that patient better, whether they're deteriorating, whether they've just had surgery, whether they're just really acutely unwell or even just a little bit unwell, or wound-healing management if someone comes to you for a wound and it needs dressing and it's quite a bad wound and you need to sort of manage that.

My favourite part of this is when they start to get better and you've been working so hard, you've been looking after them, you've been pushing the fluids, getting their nutrition or you've been dressing their wounds, you've been doing everything you possibly can to make that patient better and you're praying for them and suddenly they just get better and you see them well again.

You see the colour back in their face or you've seen them walk, the wounds are closing up - if you've seen a wound one day and it's quite a nasty wound and then the next week they come back to have it redressed and you can see that it's starting to heal that's just the most amazing thing because you know that you've done a good job and you know that because of that care that you've given to that patient they're getting better and they're getting well again.

It's just the most rewarding thing that you'll ever experience and you can't put a price on that.

The impact the patients have on our lives

I've saved this one to last because it is my personal favourite and the best one yet.

For me the most rewarding thing and the best experiences I've had is when patients don't even realise how much of a difference they make to our lives.

Patients don't realise that they think that we're making a difference to their life because we're helping them, we're making them better, we’re treating them holistically.

But actually they don't realise that they make my day.

They make my day every single day with a smile or with a thank you.

I’m so grateful for everything I do and it's just the most rewarding feeling ever.

Just recently I've had a patient - she had dementia and she couldn't remember a lot of things. She knew who she was, she knew who her husband was but apart from that she didn't know what date it was, if she washed, didn’t know the people on the wards.

There's just this one day she remembered my name and she looked at me and she called me Claire and it was the most amazing, fantastic feeling that I've ever had and I will take that feeling to my grave because it's just amazing and this is why I do it.

You know what, as much as I'm making a difference to their life they make a difference to mine and I leave work feeling proud, feeling happy and feeling honoured to be a nurse.

One of our other influencers, Louisa, created a similar video about her favourite experiences within midwifery - check it out here!

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